Identifying the ‘liberal’ in Japanese politics

By PHILIP BRASOR

Japan Times, October 21, 2017

The current group of conservative public figures in the United States wants to return to an age when certain middle-class values were ascendant, without acknowledging that many of those values were realized because President Franklin Roosevelt implemented progressive social policies and trade unions had real power. They maligned Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders for his avowed socialist platform during the 2016 presidential campaign, but much of that platform constituted the status quo in the 1950s. Later, Ronald Reagan dismantled the government structures that made the era prosperous.

There’s a similar nostalgia at work in today’s Japanese general election. On the one hand, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe wants to rewrite the Constitution in a bid to re-create the “beautiful Japan” he thinks existed before the country lost World War II, without recognizing that some of the qualities he admires led Japan to destruction.

On the other side of the ideological divide, some left-leaning politicians have feelings for the immediate postwar era, when the hard-won freedom of conscience was considered a precious right. And then there’s Yukio Edano, the former Democratic Party leader who just formed the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan as a tribute to relatively iconoclastic leaders who held sway in the early 1990s, like Takako Doi, when the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) — which had held power continually since its creation in 1955 — was losing its relevancy.

As Sophia University professor Koichi Nakano wrote in a recent New York Times op-ed, today’s election was originally seen as a two-way race between different right-wing flavors — Abe’s nostalgic LDP on the one hand and former LDP stalwart Yuriko Koike’s more media-savvy conservatism on the other. Edano’s party supposedly fills the liberal vacuum created by the collapse of the Democratic Party, whose members were not consistently liberal across its ranks anyway. In fact, many members were as conservative as Abe, which is why it was so easy for them to jump ship to Koike’s Party of Hope, especially when Koike purged it of any liberal influence.

This situation set off a conversation in the media as to what Japanese liberalism is. According to manga artist and conservative firebrand Yoshinori Kobayashi, only “stupid people” in Japan believe left-wingers are synonymous with liberals. Despite his own longing for prewar Japanese ideals, Kobayashi admires liberals for their dedication to “freedom,” which he thinks is the main philosophical pillar of liberalism. In an Oct. 7 blog post he admits to identifying more with the Japan Communist Party (JCP) — which he sees as being liberal, meaning centrist, and not “leftwing” — more than he does with the LDP or its doctrinaire brothers-in-arms Nippon Ishin no Kai. The JCP has abandoned many left-wing positions for a more practical stance.

“The JCP is changing all the time,” Kobayashi writes. “It no longer insists on abolishing the Emperor system or the Self-Defense Forces.” More significantly, the JCP is against neoliberalism and the free trade Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Kobayashi also opposes. “JCP’s policies are based on a nationalism that overlaps with conservatism,” he says, “while the LDP and Ishin support globalism and only call themselves conservatives.”

Kobayashi may be confusing liberalism with libertarianism, which, according to freelance journalist Tetsuo Jimbo, has no traction in Japan. In a discussion with veteran political operative Norihiko Narita on Jimbo’s website, Videonews.com, Jimbo says he thinks the late LDP Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa once represented the “liberal” wing of the party, though Narita makes the point that Miyazawa eventually became the standard bearer for what the media called the “new right” in Japan. Until the ’90s, the main opposition was the Japan Socialist Party, which was against the U.S.-Japan military alliance and advocated for a strict interpretation of the postwar Constitution.

Ironically, the LDP maintained power for so long because of policies that were socialist in nature. It carried out income redistribution through public works projects, which stimulated the economy until the asset-inflated bubble burst at the dawn of the ’90s. Opposition parties took advantage of the LDP’s weakness in the general election of 1993, which Narita says resembles the upcoming election in that a great deal of political retrenchment took place. The idea was to create a real two-party system, but what happened is that, due to election reform that designated one person from each party running for a constituency seat, the LDP’s traditional “faction” structure fell apart, resulting in greater power for whoever is the leader of the ruling party.

Since then, “opposition parties have become even weaker,” says Narita, “which means the media has had to act as the opposition party.” However, the press has been effectively cowed by the Abe administration. “Their fangs have been removed,” Narita says, and now there is no clear liberal force in Japanese public life.

Because there is no equivalent term in Japanese, the English word “liberal” is used. An Oct. 8 Asahi Shimbun article attempted to parse the meaning of the word and found that even Japanese dictionaries define it differently. Since both the LDP and Koike demonstrate libertarian impulses, some people are confused, and Edano has muddled matters even more by calling himself a “liberal conservative.”

If there’s anything that ideologically distinguishes ruling party conservatives, it is the idea of “individual rights,” which both Abe and Koike seem to abhor, since they equate individualism with selfishness. Pundit Takeshi Nakajimasaid in the Asahi that the LDP’s conservatism is inherently “paternalistic,” and as Narita told the Mainichi Shimbun, “50 percent of the population is opposed to changing the Constitution,” which, as it stands, guarantees the rights of individuals.

A person who defends the postwar Constitution may be the best way to identify a Japanese liberal.

Is Japan's Rightwing vulnerable to foreign pressure? Unlikely

Can foreign media pressure force changes in Japan?

BY PHILIP BRASOR
SPECIAL TO THE JAPAN TIMES, JUN 25, 2016

Former Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara’s first-person “biography” of late Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka, “Tensai” (“Genius”), remains atop best-seller lists. It is interesting to note that when Tanaka was alive Ishihara berated him as a crude opportunist. The years have obviously tempered his view, or perhaps Ishihara’s own political career helped him appreciate how an uneducated hick without connections could become the most powerful man in Japan.

The incident that caused Tanaka’s downfall, the 1970s Lockheed bribery scandal, received greater coverage overseas than it did in Japan, and one of Ishihara’s favorite themes as a public figure has been how Japan should resist foreign pressure and assert its position as a world power. Takashi Tachibana was the journalist most instrumental in exposing Tanaka’s money politics, but it was foreign press attention that made the former prime minister’s actions impossible to ignore — even in Japan.

A similar situation surrounds the rise of the right-wing lobbying group Japan Conference (Nippon Kaigi), which has received close scrutiny by the likes of the U.K. newsweekly The Economist, Australia’s ABC News and other prominent foreign media over the past year. The Japanese press has shown less interest.

In April, freelance journalist Osamu Aoki talked about “grass roots conservative movements” on TBS radio, and mentioned the overseas fascination with Nippon Kaigi, which counts among its 38,000 members Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, half his Cabinet and a good portion of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. Local reporters tend to think of Japan Conference as a cult, and thus some have characterized the foreign opinion that Abe and his government are “under the thumb of Japan Conference,” as Aoki put it, as being akin to conspiracy theory. Nevertheless, citing how the foreign press helped advance the prosecution of Tanaka, Aoki says Japan Conference could be another big story the Japanese press is missing “even though it’s right there under its nose,” and so he plans to publish a book on the organization next month.

If Aoki is hoping for a scoop, he’s too late. In April, a writer named Tamotsu Sugano published “Nippon Kaigi no Kenkyu” (“Nippon Kaigi Research”) which sold 126,000 copies in less than two months. The book purports to be the most detailed study of the group ever written, but its popularity is chiefly due to Japan Conference’s reaction. The organization’s founder, Yuzo Kabashima, wrote to Sugano’s publisher, Fusosha, asking it not to print the book. Fusosha ignored the request. Weekly magazine Shukan Post then called present and past members of Japan Conference asking why they hated the book so much. Most refused to comment. One professor who belongs to another nationalist organization told the magazine that Sugano’s report is “beyond the pale,” a “pile of lies” based on anonymous sources. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he is quoted as saying. “Whatever I say will benefit the book.” That seems to be exactly what happened.

Interviewed on the web news channel DemocraTV, Sugano admitted that he is ideologically right-of-center and did not write his book “to be critical” of Japan Conference. He just noticed that the mainstream press was not covering the group. The book is based mainly on a series of articles he wrote for the Japanese Harvard Business Review, which attracted no attention from Japan Conference when they were originally posted online. “Japan Conference members are old men and women who don’t use the internet,” he said. When the book was slated for print publication, Japan Conference finally took notice, but it thought Fusosha was a right-leaning imprint and could thus be easily persuaded. Sugano says Fusosha publishes anything “that can make money for them.” Their biggest-selling book in the same format is a study slamming the nuclear power industry, hardly a conservative position.

Sugano chronicles the group’s origins in the early ’70s. Several founding members belonged to the student wing of the religious group Seicho no Ie at the time, and its main purpose was to counterbalance the leftist student movement. After graduation, this group established its own right-wing organization, Nihon Seinen Kyogikai, which eventually merged with another like-minded group in 1977. This organization morphed into Nippon Kaigi in 1997.

Japan Conference’s formidable organizational skills have influenced government policy, especially with regard to the legality of the national anthem and flag, the definition of the “Japanese family,” the direction of education and the Constitution, which they want to change. But Japan Conference is not “conservative” in Sugano’s eyes. Its interests are purely reactionary in that they were formulated in response to left-wing interests.

So he interrogates its motives. Six lofty goals are listed on Japan Conference’s website. The first is to uphold Japan’s “beautiful traditions,” which he interprets as reestablishing a strict social hierarchy under the Emperor. Japan Conference says it wants to create an education system that “fosters a Japanese sensibility,” which Sugano says means getting rid of the teachers union, Nikkyoso, the Japanese right’s bete noire. Japan Conference aspires to contribute to world peace, which means elevating the Self-Defense Forces to the position of a national military and, according to Sugano, “bullying peace-loving liberals.”

The author believes none of these ideas merit deep thought. Except for the Self-Defense Forces’ change, most citizens would probably find them regressive. In fact, that’s the reason Seicho no Ie, which now boasts 520,000 followers, has come out against the LDP in next month’s election. Because of Sugano’s book, the religious group felt compelled to explain that it rejected politics in the ’80s, and told Shukan Post that it doesn’t support the present administration or Japan Conference, which is “stuck in the past.”

Sugano doesn’t think Japan Conference is as powerful as foreign media make them out to be, and he may be underestimating them. This lobbying group’s effectiveness lies in its ability to remain cloaked in anodyne sentiments. Sugano’s book reveals it still longs for a Japan that didn’t lose World War II — a country that doesn’t exist.